6. Mel Chin in Times Square

On July 11, Times Square Art, No Longer Empty, and Queens Museum presented the opening of Mel Chin’s Wake sculpture and mixed reality piece Unmoored as part of Mel Chin: All Over the Place, a exhibition of Chin’s work that is located not only in the Queens Museum but all over the city. According to the Queens Museum, Wake “is a presence evoking the hull of a shipwreck crossed with the skeletal remains of a marine mammal bleached by erosion and time.”

Unmoored is a collaboration between Mel Chin and Microsoft that aims to tackle the topic of climate change and prompt discourse on the subject. The piece is a mixed reality installation that “explores a potential future where global warming has gone unchecked”; it uses technology like the Microsoft HoloLens to allow viewers to explore an underwater version of Times Square to prompt participants to grasp the potential reality of climate change.